O legado árcade no Brasil: a difícil mudança

Abstract

The literary production of the main poets of the XVIIIth century i,n Minas Gerais, althou­gh to have arrived incomplete to date, and many of its poems present missing gaps, offers a reasonable amount of compositions that allow us to evaluate its quality and importance in Brazilian literary system. Cláudio Manuel da Costa, Tomás Antônio Gonzaga and Inácio José de Alvarenga Peixoto, in different proportions, are authors whom had preserved part of its poetic production. To read these poems again is to recognize, beyond the marks of the anterior tradition, the forming signs of a new tradition; it is to be instigated towards answers for the permanence of certain texts or their erasure; it is to reflect over the readin­gs that were made of these poets, making them somehow "precursors" of known rewritin­gs; it is, most of ali, to think over the interference, in the chain of tradition, of reception's regulatings ideological mechanisms.